Music
— The bulk of the paper should address the following: After reading the excerpts from Plato’s Republic, please give a short response to any or all of these questions:
a. Plato’s recommendations are for male citizens only, and they are in relation to the role of music in these persons’ lives. If we restrict our discussion to these individuals, what sort of society does he envision as his ideal society?
b. How might these goals be achieved? What kind of society would result from these recommendations? Who is left out? What would the roles of those people be?
c. Do you agree with his ideas that everything in an individual’s environment
impacts one’s identity and one’s behavior? What do you think the role of music is in Plato’s society? How is it different from ours? Do you think that listening to certain kinds of music will affect the kind of person you are?
d. Plato gives a lot of thought to the “correct” relationship of words to music. He believes that awkward text setting should be banished, and that the setting of texts must be unified with the music, not separate or different from the music. What do you think of this idea? (Remember that for the Greeks the music was improvised, for the most part, to go along with the text.)
